Mental Floss

Can You Solve This Old-Timey Riddle? #16

This riddle is nearly a century old—can you figure out the answer?

ByPaul Anthony Jones|
Can you figure it out?
Can you figure it out? | MirageC/Moment/Getty Images

In 1927, the American author (and a former dean of Harvard University) LeBaron Russell Briggs published a collection called Riddles in Rhyme: Charades Old and New. The book contained over 120 puzzles in the form of verses, each one providing a set of syllable-by-syllable clues to a specific word.

Many of Briggs’s poems are too long and complex to recreate here, but one of the shortest in his collection (and surely one of the cleverest) is below. To solve it, you should know that the “first” in the first line refers to the first syllable of the answer, while the “second” and “third” are its second and third syllables taken together, and the “whole” is the meaning of the entire word, with its individual syllables pieced back together. What six-letter word is the answer?

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